[Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Thu Oct 30 09:24:26 CDT 2008
Rachel, you misunderstood Jenifer. Its not the "disgusting infomercial"
but Barack Obama
who comes off as a "complete phony" </which is, of course, actually true/>
and his message as "totally bogus" </also true/>.
But I disagree with Jenifer, in that I doubt Obama could lose this
year's election
even if his real birth certificate were somehow produced and made public
and it showed that John S. McCain was his real father.
Rachel Storm wrote:
> I don't agree with you at all about the infomercial. I don't see how it came off as phony.
>
> ---- Original message ----
>
>> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:24:18 -0700 (PDT)
>> From: Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
>> To: Peace-discuss Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>, "Brussel Morton K." <mkbrussel at comcast.net>
>>
>> Obama and his advisors should focus on reading stuff like
>> this, instead of creating that disgusting infomercial
>> which made him look and sound like a complete phony and
>> his message sound totally bogus. Ugh. Wouldn't be
>> surprised if it costs him the election.
>> --Jenifer
>>
>> --- On Wed, 10/29/08, Brussel Morton K.
>> <mkbrussel at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> From: Brussel Morton K. <mkbrussel at comcast.net>
>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
>> To: "Peace-discuss Discuss"
>> <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
>> Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 5:24 PM
>>
>> The Devastation in Iraq Is Systematic -- And It's About
>> to Get Much Worse
>>
>> By Michael Schwartz, Tomdispatch.com. Posted October
>> 27, 2008.
>> Iraq's state of complete disrepair has created a
>> population in steaming discontent.
>>
>> Controversial Status of Forces Agreement Facing Iraqi
>> Opposition
>>
>> The Roman historian Tacitus famously put the following
>> lines in the mouth of a British chieftain opposed to
>> imperial Rome: "They have plundered the world,
>> stripping naked the land in their hunger they are
>> driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition,
>> if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by
>> false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the
>> construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing
>> remains but a desert, they call that peace."
>>
>> Or, in the case of the Bush administration, post-surge
>> "success." Today, however, success in Iraq seems as
>> elusive as ever for the President. The Iraqi cabinet is
>> now refusing, without further amendment, to pass on to
>> Parliament the status of forces agreement for
>> stationing U.S. troops in the country that it's taken
>> so many months for American and Iraqi negotiators to
>> sort out. Key objections, as Juan Cole points out at
>> his Informed Comment blog, have come from the Islamic
>> Supreme Council of Iraq, which is [Prime Minister
>> Nouri] al-Maliki's chief political partner, the support
>> of which he would need to get the draft through
>> parliament." That party, Cole adds tellingly, "is close
>> to Tehran, which objects to the agreement." The Iranian
>> veto? Hmmm
>>
>> Among Iraqis, according to the Dreyfuss Report, only
>> the Kurds, whose territories house no significant U.S.
>> forces, remain unequivocally in favor of the agreement
>> as written. Frustrated American officials, including
>> Ambassador Ryan Crocker ("Without legal authority to
>> operate, we do not operate That means no security
>> operations, no logistics, no training, no support for
>> Iraqis on the borders, no nothing"), Secretary of
>> Defense Robert Gates ("Without a new legal
>> agreement,'we basically stop doing anything' in the
>> country"), and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen
>> ("We are clearly running out of time") are huffing and
>> puffing, and threatening -- if the agreement is not
>> passed as is -- to blow the house down.
>>
>> Without a mandate to remain, American troops won't
>> leave, of course. At year's end, they will, so American
>> officials insist, simply retreat to their bases and
>> assumedly leave Maliki's government to dangle in the
>> expected gale. Clearly, this is a game of chicken.
>> What's less clear is who's willing to go over the
>> cliff, or who exactly is going to put on the brakes.
>>
>> In the meantime, the administration that, only four
>> years ago, imposed conditions on Iraq at least as
>> onerous as those nineteenth century colonial powers
>> imposed on their colonies, can no longer get an
>> agreement it desperately needs from its "allies" in
>> Baghdad. Could this, then, be the $700 billion
>> kiss-off? Stay tuned and, in the meantime, consider, as
>> described by TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz, what
>> the Bush administration did to Iraq these last five
>> years. Imagine it as a preview of the devastation the
>> administration's domestic version of de-Baathification
>> is now doing to the U.S. economy.
>>
>> Schwartz's striking piece encapsulates a story he's
>> been following closely for years: the everyday economic
>> violence that invasion and occupation brought to Iraq.
>> It's being posted in honor of the just-released latest
>> TomDispatch volume, his War Without End: The Iraq War
>> in Context, beautifully produced by Haymarket Books.
>> Think of this superb new work on the American war in
>> Iraq as Tacitus updated. In it, Schwartz offers a
>> gripping history -- the best we have -- of how (to
>> steal a phrase from the Roman historian), "driven by
>> greed [and] ambition," the U.S. dismantled Iraq
>> economically. It's a nightmare of a tale, which you can
>> watch Schwartz discuss in a brief video by clicking
>> here. If this be "success," then we truly are wandering
>> in the desert. (By the way, any author profits from the
>> book will go to IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against the War.)
>> Tom
>>
>> Wrecked Iraq
>>
>> What the Good News from Iraq Really Means
>> By Michael Schwartz
>>
>> As the Smoke Clears in Iraq: Even before the
>> spectacular presidential election campaign became a
>> national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since
>> the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage
>> of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing.
>> National newspapers had long since discontinued their
>> daily feasts of multiple -- usually front page -
>> reports on the country, replacing them with meager
>> meals of mostly inside-the-fold summary stories. On
>> broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq
>> had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went
>> by without a mention of the war.
>>
>> The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful
>> reports of desperate battles and miserable Iraqis
>> disappeared. There are still occasional stories about
>> high-profile bombings or military campaigns in obscure
>> places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in
>> old hot spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions,
>> and the newly emerging routines of ordinary life.
>>
>> A typical "return to normal life" piece appeared
>> October 11th in the New York Times under the headline,
>> "Schools Open, and the First Test is Iraqi Safety."
>> Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her
>> students by assuring them that "security has returned
>> to Baghdad, city of peace."
>>
>> Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam
>> Dagher hedged the "return to normal" theme. Here was
>> his first paragraph in full:
>> "On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama
>> looked uneasy standing in formation under an already
>> stifling morning sun. She and dozens of schoolmates
>> listened to a teacher's pep talk -- probably a
>> necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn
>> playground."
>>
>> This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad
>> public school, amplified in the body of Dagher's
>> article by other examples, is symptomatic of the larger
>> reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated)
>> decline in violence in that country has allowed foreign
>> reporters to move around enough to report on the real
>> conditions facing Iraqis, and so should have provided
>> U.S. readers with a far fuller picture of the
>> devastation George Bush's war wrought.
>>
>> In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign
>> reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news
>> is coming out of that wrecked land. The major
>> newspapers and networks have drastically reduced their
>> staffs there and -- with a relative trickle of
>> exceptions like Dagher's fine report -- what's left is
>> often little more than a collection of pronouncements
>> from the U.S. military, or Iraqi and American political
>> leaders in Baghdad and Washington, framing the American
>> public's image of the situation there.
>>
>> In addition, the devastation that is now Iraq is not of
>> a kind that can always be easily explained in a short
>> report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily
>> repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on
>> artillery and air power during the worst days of
>> fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure.
>> Political and economic changes imposed by the American
>> occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving
>> Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very
>> tools they would now need to launch a major
>> reconstruction effort in their own country.
>>
>> As a consequence, what was once the most advanced
>> Middle Eastern society -- economically, socially, and
>> technologically -- has become an economic basket case,
>> rivaling the most desperate countries in the world.
>> Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches,
>> which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used
>> until U.S. forces withdraw from the country, provides a
>> glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out
>> of the abyss into which the U.S. invasion pushed it.
>>
>> Consider only a small sampling of the devastation.
>>
>> The Economy: Fundamental to the American occupation was
>> the desire to annihilate Saddam Hussein's Baathist
>> state apparatus and the economic system it commanded. A
>> key aspect of this was the closing down of the vast
>> majority of state-owned economic enterprises (with the
>> exception of those involved in oil extraction and
>> electrical generation).
>>
>> In all, 192 establishments, adding up to 35% of the
>> Iraqi economy, were shuttered in the summer and fall of
>> 2003. These included basic manufacturing processes like
>> leather tanning and tractor assembly that supplied
>> other sectors, transportation firms that dominated
>> national commerce, and maintenance enterprises that
>> housed virtually all the technicians and engineers
>> qualified to service the electrical, water, oil, and
>> other infrastructural systems in the country.
>>
>> Justified as the way to bring a modern free-enterprise
>> system to backward Iraq, this draconian program was put
>> in place by the President's proconsul in Baghdad, L.
>> Paul Bremer III. The result? An immediate depression
>> that only deepened in the years to follow.
>>
>> One measure of this policy's impact can be found in the
>> demise of the leather goods industry, a key
>> pre-invasion sector of Iraq's non-petroleum economy.
>> When a government-owned tanning operation, which all by
>> itself employed 30,000 workers and supplied leather to
>> an entire industry, was shuttered in late 2003, it
>> deprived shoe-makers and other leather goods
>> establishments of their key resource. Within a year,
>> employment in the industry had dropped from 200,000
>> workers to a mere 20,000.
>>
>> By the time Bremer left Iraq in the spring of 2004, the
>> inhabitants of many cities faced 60% unemployment.
>> Meanwhile, the country's agriculture, a key component
>> of its economy, was also victimized by the dismantling
>> of government establishments and services. The lush
>> farming areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
>> suffered badly. The once-thriving date palm industry
>> was a typical casualty. It suffered deadly infestations
>> of pests when the occupation eliminated a
>> government-run insecticide spraying program. Even oil
>> refinery-based industrial towns like Baiji became
>> cities of slums when plants devoted to non-petroleum
>> activities were shuttered.
>>
>> This economic devastation fueled the insurgency by
>> generating desperation, anger, and willing recruits.
>> The explosion of resistance, in turn, tended to obscure
>> -- at least for western news services -- the desperate
>> circumstances under which ordinary Iraqis labored.
>>
>> As violence has subsided in Baghdad and elsewhere,
>> demands for relief have come to the fore. These are not
>> easily answered by a still largely non-functional
>> central government in Baghdad whose administrative and
>> economic apparatus was long ago dismantled, and many of
>> whose key technical personnel had fled into exile.
>> Meanwhile, in early 2006, the American occupation
>> declared that further reconstruction work would be the
>> responsibility of Iraqis. It is not clear into what
>> channels the growing discontent over an economy that
>> remains largely in the tank and a government that still
>> cannot deliver ordinary services will flow.
>>
>> Electricity: A critical factor in Iraq's collapse has
>> been its decaying electrical grid. In areas where the
>> insurgency raged, facilities involved in producing and
>> transmitting electricity were targeted, both by the
>> insurgents and U.S. forces, each trying to deprive the
>> other of needed resources. In addition, Bremer
>> eliminated the government-owned maintenance and
>> engineering enterprises that had been holding the
>> electrical system together ever since the U.N.
>> sanctions regime after the 1991 Gulf War deprived Iraq
>> of material needed to repair and upgrade its
>> facilities. Maintenance and replacement contracts were
>> given instead to multinational companies with little
>> knowledge of the existing system and -- due to
>> cost-plus contracting -- every incentive to replace
>> facilities with their own proprietary technology. In
>> the meantime, many Iraqi technicians left the country.
>>
>> The successor Iraqi governments, deprived of the
>> capacity to manage the system's reconstruction,
>> continued the U.S. occupation policy of contracting
>> with foreign companies. Even in areas of the country
>> relatively unaffected by the fighting, those companies
>> did the lucrative thing, replacing entire sections of
>> the electric grid, often with inappropriate but
>> exquisitely expensive equipment and technology.
>>
>> A combination of factors -- including pressure from the
>> insurgency, the soaring costs of security, and an
>> almost unparalleled record of endemic waste and
>> corruption -- led to costs well beyond those originally
>> offered for the already overpriced projects. Many were
>> then abandoned before completion as funding ran out.
>> Completed projects were often shabbily done and just as
>> often proved incompatible with existing facilities,
>> introducing new inefficiencies.
>>
>> In one altogether-too-typical case, Bechtel installed
>> 26 natural gas turbines in areas where no natural gas
>> was available. The turbines were then converted to oil,
>> which reduced their capacity by 50% and led to a rapid
>> sludge build-up in the equipment requiring expensive
>> maintenance no Iraqi technicians had been trained to
>> perform. In location after location, the turbines
>> became inoperative.
>>
>> Even before the invasion, the decrepit electrical
>> system could not meet national demand. No province had
>> uninterrupted service and certain areas had far less
>> than 12 hours of service per day. The vast investments
>> by the occupation and its successor regimes have
>> increased electrical capacity since the invasion of
>> 2003, but these gains have not come close to keeping up
>> with skyrocketing demand created by the presence of
>> hundreds of thousands of troops, private security
>> personnel, and occupation officials, as well as by the
>> introduction of all manner of electronic devices and
>> products in the post-invasion period. Recent U.N.
>> reports indicate that, in the last year, electrical
>> capacity has slipped to less than half of demand. With
>> priority going to military and government operations,
>> many Baghdad neighborhoods experience less than two
>> hours of publicly provided electricity a day, forcing
>> citizens and business enterprises to utilize expensive
>> and polluting gasoline generators.
>>
>> In spring of this year, 81% of Iraqis reported that
>> they had experienced inadequate electricity in the
>> previous month. During the heat of summer and the cold
>> of winter, these shortages create real health
>> emergencies.
>>
>> In 2004, the U.N. estimated that $20 billion in
>> reconstruction funds would be needed for a fully
>> operative electrical grid. The estimates now range from
>> $40 billion to $80 billion.
>>
>> Water: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow
>> through the country from the northwest to the
>> southeast, have since time immemorial irrigated the
>> rich farming land that lay between them, nurtured the
>> fish that are a staple of the Iraqi diet, and provided
>> water for animal and human consumption. American-style
>> warfare, with its reliance on tank, artillery, and air
>> power, often resulted in the cratering of streets in
>> upstream Sunni cities like Tal Afar, Falluja, and
>> Samarra where the insurgency was strongest. One result
>> was the wrecking of already weakened underground sewage
>> systems. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, for
>> instance, where much fighting has taken place and
>> American air power was called in regularly, there is
>> now a lake of sewage clearly visible on satellite
>> photographs.
>>
>> The ultimate destination of significant parts of the
>> filth from devastated sewage systems was the two
>> rivers. Five years worth of such waste flowing through
>> the streets and into those rivers has left them
>> thoroughly contaminated. Their water can no longer be
>> safely drunk by humans or animals, the remaining fish
>> cannot be safely eaten, and the contaminated water
>> reportedly withers the crops it irrigates.
>>
>> Iraq's never-adequate water purification system has
>> proven woefully insufficient to handle this massive
>> flow of contamination, while inadequate electric
>> supplies insure that the country's few functional
>> purification plants are less than effective.
>>
>> In many cities, the sewage system must be entirely
>> reconstructed, but repairs cannot even begin without a
>> viable electrical system, a reinvigorated engineering
>> and construction sector, and a government capable of
>> marshalling these resources. None of these
>> prerequisites currently exist.
>>
>> Schools: Education has been a victim of all the various
>> pathologies current in Iraqi society. During the
>> initial invasion, the U.S. military often commandeered
>> schools as forward bases, attracted by their
>> well-defined perimeters, open spaces for vehicles, and
>> many rooms for offices and barracks. Two incidents in
>> which American gunfire from an occupied elementary
>> school killed Iraqi civilians in the conservative Sunni
>> city of Falluja may have been the literal sparks that
>> started the insurgency. Many schools would subsequently
>> be rendered uninhabitable by destructive battles fought
>> in or near them.
>>
>> Under the U.S. occupation's de-Baathification policy,
>> thousands of teachers who belonged to the Baath Party
>> were fired, leaving hundreds of thousands of students
>> teacherless. In addition, the shuttering of government
>> enterprises deprived the schools of supplies --
>> including books and teaching materials -- as well as
>> urgently needed maintenance.
>>
>> The American solution, as with the electric grid, was
>> to hire multinational firms to repair the schools and
>> rehabilitate school systems. The result was an orgy of
>> corruption accompanied by very little practical aid.
>> Local school officials complained that facilities with
>> no windows, heating, or toilet facilities were
>> repainted and declared fit for use.
>>
>> The dwindling central government presence made schools
>> inviting arenas for sectarian conflict, with
>> administrators, teachers, and especially college
>> professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for
>> ideological reasons. This, in turn, stimulated a mass
>> exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists from
>> the country, removing precious human capital essential
>> for future reconstruction.
>>
>> Finally, in Baghdad, the U.S. military began installing
>> ten-foot tall cement walls around scores of communities
>> and neighborhoods to wall off participants in the
>> sectarian violence. As a result, schoolchildren were
>> often separated from their schools, reducing attendance
>> at the few intact facilities to those students who
>> happened to live within the imprisoning walls.
>>
>> This fall, as some of these walls were dismantled,
>> residents discovered that many of the schools were
>> virtually unusable. The Times's Dagher offered a vivid
>> description, for instance, of a school in the Dolaie
>> neighborhood which "is falling apart, and overwhelmed
>> by the children of almost 4,000 Shiite refugee families
>> who have settled in the Chukouk camp nearby. The roof
>> is caving in, classroom floors and hallways are
>> stripped bare, and in the playground a pile of burnt
>> trash was smoldering."
>>
>> The Dysfunctional Society: Much has been made in the
>> U.S. presidential campaign of the $70 billion oil
>> surplus the Iraqi government built up in these last
>> years as oil prices soared. In actuality, most of it is
>> currently being held in American financial
>> institutions, with various American politicians
>> threatening to confiscate it if it is not
>> constructively spent. Yet even this bounty reflects the
>> devastation of the war.
>>
>> De-Baathification and subsequent chaos rendered the
>> Iraqi government incapable of effectively administering
>> projects that lay outside the fortified,
>> American-controlled Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad.
>> A vast flight of the educated class to Syria, Jordan,
>> and other countries also deprived it of the managers
>> and technicians needed to undertake serious
>> reconstruction on a large scale.
>>
>> As a consequence, less than 25% of the funds budgeted
>> for facility construction and reconstruction last year
>> were even spent. Some government ministries spent less
>> than 1% of their allocations. In the meantime, the
>> large oil surpluses have become magnets for massive
>> governmental corruption, further infuriating frustrated
>> citizens who, after five years, still often lack the
>> most basic services. Transparency International's 2008
>> "corruption perceptions index" listed Iraq as tied for
>> 178th place among the 180 countries evaluated.
>>
>> The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion
>> and occupation is now a thoroughly wrecked land,
>> housing a largely dysfunctional society. More than a
>> million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their
>> homes; many millions of others have been scarred by
>> war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations,
>> extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of
>> common criminality. Education and medical systems have
>> essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind
>> of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most
>> dangerous societies on earth.
>>
>> As its crisis deepened, the various areas of social and
>> technical devastation became ever more entwined,
>> reinforcing one another. The country's degraded sewage
>> and water systems, for example, have spawned two
>> consecutive years of widespread cholera. It seems
>> likely that this year, the disease will only subside
>> when the cold weather makes further contagion
>> impossible, but this "solution" also guarantees its
>> reoccurrence each year until water purification systems
>> are rebuilt.
>>
>> In the meantime, cholera victims cannot rely on Iraq's
>> once vaunted medical system, since two-thirds of the
>> country's doctors have fled, its hospitals are often in
>> a state of advanced decay and disrepair, drugs remain
>> scarce, and equipment, if available at all, is
>> outdated. The rebuilding of the water and medical
>> systems, however, cannot get fully underway unless the
>> electrical system is restored to reasonable shape.
>> Repair of the electrical grid awaits a reliable oil and
>> gas pipeline system to provide fuel for generators, and
>> this cannot be constructed without the expertise of
>> technicians who have left the country, or newly trained
>> specialists that the educational system is now
>> incapable of producing. And so it goes.
>>
>> On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews
>> powerful feelings of discontent, which explains why
>> American military leaders regularly insist that the
>> country's current relative quiescence is, at best,
>> "fragile." They believe only the most minimal
>> reductions in U.S. forces in Iraq (still hovering at
>> close to 150,000 troops) are advisable.
>>
>> Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities,
>> military officials working close to the ground know
>> that the country's state of disrepair, and an inability
>> to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a
>> population in steaming discontent. At any moment, this
>> could explode in further sectarian violence or yet
>> another violent effort to expel the U.S. forces from
>> the country.
>>
>> See more stories tagged with: iraq, reconstruction
>>
>> Michael Schwartz is a professor of sociology and
>> faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global
>> Studies at Stony Brook University.
>>
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